True... and I bet the performance was significally slower. Also I think the portability in those languages was also limited.
Obvious, since those systems pre-dated PDP-11 hardware.
> Also I think the portability in those languages was also limited.
Have you ever coded C before ANSI C was approved?
It was only portable to UNIX itself, just like those other OSes and their systems programming languages.
Each C compiler outside UNIX implemented its own subset and semantics, hence why ANSI C had to adopt so much UB to avoid breaking too much code.
Well, I was actually referring to the equivalent running on PDP-11 (like Algol68)
> Have you ever coded C before ANSI C was approved?
>It was only portable to UNIX itself, just like those other OSes and their systems programming languages.
I meant machine portability. Before C, to have a lower level like performance you needed to use machine-specific assembly.
On workstations and mainframes there was hardly any difference to other heigher level system programming languages. In fact C prevented many compiler optimizations due to its aliasing and decay of arrays into pointers.
Except Algol, PL/I, PL/M and many others already existed and pre-dated the computers used to develop C on.
"A consequence of this principle is that every occurrence of every subscript of every subscripted variable was on every occasion checked at run time against both the upper and the lower declared bounds of the array. Many years later we asked our customers whether they wished us to provide an option to switch off these checks in the interests of efficiency on production runs. Unanimously,they urged us not to--they already knew how frequently subscript errors occur on production runs where failure to detect them could be disastrous. I note with fear and horror that even in 1980, language designers and users have not learned this lesson. In any respectable branch of engineering, failure to observe such elementary precautions would have long been against the law."
- C.A.R Hoare at his 1980 ACM Turing Award Lecture
Algol was created in 1960 and run in computers much more humble that the PDP-11.
> And second, the constant stream of news about trivial SQL injections, cross-site scripting vulnerabilities and other such things should make it plenty obvious that you can write unsecure code in any language.
Those don't suffer from memory corruption issues. So there is a whole class of security exploits one doesn't need to worry about.